Turning Point

The day that Gamal Abdel Nasser persists in calling Victory Day--actually the anniversary of the withdrawal of the unbeaten British and French troops from Suez two years ago--has become an Egyptian holiday. Last week it was observed with massed schoolboy gymnastics and by the symbolic refloating of one of the ships sunk to block the canal. It was also marked by a speech from a somewhat subdued Nasser, who for the first time attacked the Communists. His oratory hardly matched the invective he has expended on the West, but it was a start.

The Communists he brought into the Middle East three years ago are now fighting him and sabotaging Arab nationalism in Syria. They "opposed the union of Syria and Egypt because they thought it would destroy their opportunities," he told the crowd at Port Said. "Some" of their members, he went on, even called for "disunity."

To "investigate" the troubled Syrian situation, Nasser announced appointment of a three-man committee, including his police boss, Zakaria Mohieddin, and Vice President Akram Hourani, the Baath Socialist leader who rushed his country into union with Egypt last year precisely to avert a Communist takeover.

Day after Nasser's speech, Damascus' Communist newspaper Al Noor went out of business. Syrian Communist Boss Khaled Bakdash, the leading Communist in the Arab world, went underground. Nasser's Syrian proconsul, Colonel Abdel Hamid Serraj, was more emphatic than Nasser. "The Communist Party has shown its real self," he said. "Its attitude is treason to the Arab cause and a dagger's stab directed by people who do not represent the real face of the Syrian region."

Yet, if Nasser had decided at last that he was in jeopardy from the Communists, he was moving cautiously. At week's end there were many rumors but little evidence of Communist arrests in Syria. He carefully made no mention at all of the even touchier situation created by the Communists in Iraq. Nasser's regime signed a contract with a Soviet delegation in Cairo for the building of Nasser's Aswan high dam, and Nasser's propagandists, covering the boss's anxious retreat, put out the naive-sounding line that Arabs must distinguish sharply between bad local Communists and good Russians. Nothing in the Syrian unpleasantness, wrote Nasser's trained seal. Editor Mohammed Heikal of Al Ahram, must be allowed to affect "in any way the great victory we achieved in earning the friendship of the Soviet Union."

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